If you’re stuck on using a database instead of Perl, you could use MySQL with ODBC, and write a simple JScript or VBScript program. Okay, so that’s not much different from doing Perl with the raw data.
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is free, and usable for commercial applications; Microsoft includes documentation on how to install it along with your own distributables. However, it is limited to one processor (though a dual-core is still considered one processor) and 2 GB per database.
The free versions of Visual Studio 2005 (if you’re a programmer) include some decent database tools, although not as generally useful as the tools that come with the commercial versions of SQL Server or Oracle.